Completely agree with you. It annoys me when companies put on gimmicky designs such as bullets/firearms as heatsinks. I've seen plenty of creative/awesome heatsink designs that uses unique angular designs and looks amazing, instead of this crappy feel of "firearms". It's a computer motherboard for crying out loud, not a damn rifle. One thing's for sure, I will never buy any product that has heatsinks looking like that. Reply

Anyways.... if you're through with your childish rant... who cares what it looks like? Look at the benchmarks, the feature set and the supplied software. If you don't have a window in your case why on Earth would you care what it looks like? Function over form is what I always say.Reply

Anyways, if you're through with your narrow point of view, what if someone has a window on their case and care what the mobo looks likes? I never knew that having an opinion that differs from yours, hail the almighty, makes that person childish. Get off your high horse.Reply

I agree with you, everyone has their own personal opinion and it is about personal taste in esthetics. I merely voiced my own opinion but when someone else comes in and starts an ad hominem attack about how someone else opinion's is "childish" because it differs from theirs, then I would say that is a narrow point of view. Any person could have simply disagreed respectfully like how adults do and it would have been perfectly fine.

Just like for you, if you used this board for it's features, I would have no problem and would not find any fault in your decision because it is your own opinion which I respect.

"Giant fag" might be going a bit far but unless MSI is aiming for the immature 14 year old who lives their life through MW or BF I think they missed the mark big time with the design. Which is too bad because I otherwise I like the murdered out all black aesthetic.

As it is Asus, Gigabyte are both making great boards that don't look stupid so I can easily skip this and look elsewhere.Reply

This particle article I didn't care to read in its entirety, so I glanced through hoping to find the few pieces of information I wanted. One was the MSRP... it's always listed at the bottom of the spec list in every other review on this site. Why omit it here? Please adhere to some of these simple standards so that your articles are less taxing on the reader.Reply

There are no official standards in motherboard reviewing, so unless you provide a list of official 'simple standards' then there is nothing to do apart from consider your request/command to have it exactly where you specifically want information XYZ. The MSRP is listed in a number of places throughout the review (and is consistent with previous reviews) - a link through on the product to a retailer on the test bed, and the last page in particular. It wouldn't be a proper review if we didn't talk about the price! For the record, it is currently $390.

Sure there is. The articles on this site follow a similar pattern regardless of what they're about. After not finding the price in the introduction, I knew to jump to the page that introduces the board to find the spec sheet. Unfortunately, the price was not listed at the bottom as it normally is.

Of course you talked about the price, I just didn't want to read the full article to find it as I alluded to in my first post. It's a request based on what I'm used to at this site, not a command.

And by the way, there are very few articles I rarely read from beginning to end here. It's just the theme of this board is childish, like a cheap toy when it's anything but.Reply

Odd that on such an expensive mobo with dual LAN and both kinds of spdif, they included firewire of all things but left out eSATA from the main cluster? It seems like a 'core' enough feature that it shouldn't require an expansion plate like this one does imo.Reply

In addition because XL-ATX cases have room for 10 expansion slots you could mount the bracket between the main cluster and top GPU; so you it won't cut into your expansion like it would on a standard ATX system.Reply

I disagree. Onboard X-Fi is far better than the regular ALC codecs, and I'm saying that with my living room computer using a $160 shielded X-Fi PCIe card and my personal desktop using the Asus ROG. I can't tell the difference between the 2 using the same 5.1 setup.

I'm also not touching Asus' sound solutions just based on reviews of their products at retailers. Granted, I haven't looked at every model from them.

I agree that I'd rather not have any sound solution on the motherboard, unless of course it's a full discreet solution integrated in the board. But like I said, I'm very happy with the X-Fi chip in the ROGs.Reply

That the reviewer very mistakenly thinks that BIOS flashback, SSD caching, better fan controls, and an auto-overclock system are worth $70 alone illustrates how worthless his opinions and reviews are to me and to most users.Reply

The MSI mainboard is also capable of quad SLI, whereas the Asus board is not.

As far as someone who likes to call himself "TerdFerguson" speaking for most other Anandtech users - I suggest your opinion of yourself is grossly over-inflated. The only fault that I find hear is that some Anandtech moderator hasn't required you to change your name to something less tasteless.

It's good to see MSI producing top-level boards again. Most of my builds pre-Nehalem were based on MSI products, but my last 2 builds were not in part because MSI had nothing competitive to offer at the time (for my particular purposes). Good job MSI!

Your point is partly valid though as the slots aren't properly multiplexed for scenarios where all seven slots would be occupied(GPGPU, storage, etc).

In any case I'd be the last person to mourn the death of PCI, but Intel needs to get more lanes into the CPUs to reduce the amount of multiplexing in order for this amount of slots to make real sense.Reply